Introduction
In 2025, horror has taken a quieter, more unsettling turn-one that seeps into the mind rather than jumps from the shadows. Gone are the days when monsters were only found under the bed; now, they live within us-in guilt, grief, and fractured memory. This year’s psychological horror novels blur the line between fear and feeling, weaving tales that haunt not because of what’s seen, but because of what’s felt. Whether it’s the paranoia of isolation, the dread of identity loss, or the dark corners of human desire, these stories remind us that the scariest thing of all might just be the mind itself.
1. Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Beautiful Ugly |
| Author | Alice Feeney |
| Genre | Psychological Thriller & Mystery |
| Published | January 14, 2025 by Flatiron Books |
| Print Length | 306 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Beautiful-Ugly-Novel-Alice-Feeney/dp/125033778X |
Summary
In the opening of the story, Grady Green is riding high: his novel is about to become a bestseller and his relationship with his wife Abby, a journalist, seems stable. But during a phone call to share his success, Abby, driving home, abruptly stops-she slams on the brakes, the car door opens, and then she disappears. Grady finds her abandoned car at a cliff edge, the engine still on and her phone inside yet Abby herself is nowhere to be found.
A year later, Grady is a broken man: blocked creatively, haunted by grief and guilt, and struggling to move forward. His agent (and Abby’s godmother) Kitty offers him a remote writing retreat on the Scottish Isle of Amberly. Desperate for change, Grady accepts and arrives to the cabin, only to find the island filled with strange echoes of Abby: newspaper clippings of her investigations, someone who looks exactly like her, and the sense that nothing is as it seems.
As the psychological tension escalates, Grady’s isolation and paranoia deepen. On Amberly, he uncovers a hidden manuscript, the remains of a human hand beneath the floorboards, and receives anonymous articles Abby wrote about the island’s women-women whose lives are somehow tangled with his missing spouse. Meanwhile, we are shown flashbacks to Abby’s life and her investigations, gradually revealing that Grady isn’t the innocent victim he appears to be. His own unresolved insecurities and secrets begin to surface. Ultimately, the novel becomes less about a missing wife and more about shattered identities, betrayals hidden beneath the surface, and the thin line between victim and perpetrator.
2. The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | The Staircase in the Woods |
| Author | Chuck Wendig |
| Genre | Horror, Thriller & Mystery |
| Published | April 29, 2025 by Del Rey |
| Print Length | 388 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Staircase-Woods-Chuck-Wendig/dp/0593156560 |
In the heart of a quiet forest, under the hush of trees and the weight of past friendships, a stairway appears and nothing after that is ever quite the same. The Staircase in the Woods opens with five teenage friends bound by a solemn promise to protect one another. On what begins as a camping trip, they uncover a strange staircase rising from the earth, leading to nowhere. One of them ascends and vanishes into thin air. Years later, the remaining friends are drawn back together by a call to revisit their past, and the stairway waits again.
This novel is more than just a supernatural thriller; it’s a tangled meditation on youth, guilt and the long shadow of choices that echoed through the years. The forest and its staircase become metaphors for what lies buried inside human memory, and what can happen when we refuse to let the past go.
As Wendig guides us back and forth between the heady freedom of adolescence and the brittle realities of adulthood, the lines blur: what’s real, what’s imagined, and what’s deliberately hidden? The story creeps up on you-not just in jumps and scares, but in the quiet moments of looking at an old friend, remembering a promise, and asking yourself: did I ever truly leave that stairway behind?
3. Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng |
| Author | Kylie Lee Baker |
| Genre | Horror, Mystery, Fiction & Thriller |
| Published | April 29, 2025 by MIRA |
| Print Length | 304 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Eater-Other-Names-Cora-Zeng/dp/0778368459 |
24-year-old Cora Zeng works as a crime-scene cleaner in New York City’s Chinatown during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Already grappling with the trauma of witnessing her half-sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train just after a man whispered “bat eater” as the train closed in-Cora tries to keep her life together despite her escalating anxieties around germs, subway rails, and masks.
As she cleans up the aftermath of brutal murders and suicides many of the victims who look like her, East-Asian women-Cora begins to notice odd details: bat carcasses at crime scenes, missing food in her apartment, bite marks on her table, and even the faint sense that Delilah’s ghost might be visiting. At the same time, her cultural heritage presses in: her aunt urges her to honour the Hungry Ghost Festival, ancient Chinese beliefs challenge her rational mind, and she must navigate a world where racism, pandemic panic, and supernatural dread collide.
Eventually, Cora must face a fearful possibility that the killer targeting Asian women, the hungry ghosts of the dead, and her own untreated trauma are entwined. The novel immerses us in a story where the supernatural horror (ghosts, folklore, the haunted body) meets real-world social horror (anti-Asian violence, pandemic paranoia, identity loss). The title “Bat Eater” becomes a charged symbol of racial hatred, the predator-prey dynamics in Cora’s life, and the very real ghosts of what has been done to her community.
4. Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Hungerstone |
| Author | Kat Dunn |
| Genre | Horror, Vampires & Gothic |
| Published | February 18, 2025 by Zando |
| Print Length | 336 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/-/hi/Kat-Dunn/dp/1638932166 |
Lenore Crowther is ten years into a marriage with steel-magnate Henry and living in London, but their relationship has grown distant and without children. Henry’s ambitions pull them out of the city and into the moorlands at the estate Nethershaw, where he plans a grand hunting party.
On the journey, they rescue a mysterious woman named Carmilla following a carriage accident. Carmilla is pale by day yet vibrant by night and draws Lenore’s attention in unsettling ways. Soon after, girls in the nearby villages begin to fall ill, consumed by a strange “hunger.” Lenore realises her own desires and the roles she’s been forced into are shifting.
As Lenore unravels the secrets of her household, her role, and the nature of Carmilla’s presence, she faces a transformation. The novel entwines themes of female power, desire, autonomy, and the monstrous, set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and gothic wilderness.
5. Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Victorian Psycho |
| Author | Virginia Feito |
| Genre | Horror, Gothic & Historical Fiction |
| Published | February 4, 2025 by Liveright |
| Print Length | 208 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Victorian-Psycho-Virginia-Feito/dp/1631498630 |
In late-19th century England, the enigmatic governess Winifred Notty arrives at the gloomy estate of the Pounds family at Ensor House to care for their two children, Drusilla and Andrew. From the start, Winifred’s narration is chillingly off-kilter: she hints that by Christmas “everyone in this house will be dead,” and her thoughts drip with detached cruelty and sardonic wit.
As Winifred settles in, the household’s surface of genteel Victorian respectability begins to crack. The master and mistress of the house appear complicit in tradition and moral hypocrisy, servants are uneasy, and the children strange. Winifred’s disdain for her hosts and her own dark compulsions become more apparent: she recounts past violence, engages in grotesque behaviour (such as dinner-table disruptions and overt challenges to the norms of propriety) and seems poised to bring the house crashing down.
The horror culminates in a sequence of cruelty, carnage and chaos around the Christmas festivities where the veneer of civility shatters and Winifred’s true intentions are revealed. It’s a tight, visceral ride through gothic atmosphere, psychological disturbance and social critique: the setting, the narrator, and the violence all combine to question who the real monsters are when the rules of class, gender and morality are used as instruments of oppression.
6. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Witchcraft for Wayward Girls |
| Author | Grady Hendrix |
| Genre | Horror, Fantasy & Historical Fiction |
| Published | January 14, 2025 by Berkley |
| Print Length | 482 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Witchcraft-Wayward-Girls-Grady-Hendrix/dp/0593818180 |
Set in 1970s Florida, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix follows fifteen-year-old Neva Craven, who is sent away to Wellwood House, a grim maternity home for unwed pregnant girls. Renamed “Fern” upon arrival, Neva finds herself trapped in a system that strips the girls of their identities and forces them to surrender their babies for adoption. The home’s strict rules and suffocating atmosphere reflect the cruel moral judgment placed on young women of the era, turning the setting into a place of both silence and suffering.
When a traveling librarian named Miss Parcae visits the home with her bookmobile, she offers Fern a strange, rebellious gift-a guide titled How to Be a Groovy Witch. What begins as a form of escapism soon becomes something far more powerful, as Fern and the other girls secretly begin experimenting with spells, charms, and rituals. The witchcraft becomes both a metaphor and a means of resistance, allowing them to reclaim some agency in a world that has taken everything from them.
As the girls’ connection to witchcraft deepens, the story descends into darker territory. Their small acts of rebellion lead to unforeseen consequences, blurring the line between the supernatural and the horrifying realities of their confinement. Hendrix weaves real-world cruelty with eerie magical undertones, showing that the most terrifying forces aren’t ghosts or demons but the institutions that crush young women’s spirits. The result is a haunting, emotionally charged tale of friendship, rebellion, and the desperate search for freedom in a world that refuses to understand them.
7. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | The Buffalo Hunter Hunter |
| Author | Stephen Graham Jones |
| Genre | Horror, Vampires & Historical Fiction |
| Published | March 18, 2025 by S&S/Saga Press |
| Print Length | 448 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Buffalo-Hunter-Stephen-Graham-Jones/dp/1668075083 |
In 2012, academic Etsy Beaucarne uncovers a hidden manuscript behind the wall of her ancestor’s home-a diary written by her great-great-great-grandfather, Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, dating back to 1912. As she reads his transcribed confessions and the strange visits from one Good Stab, a Blackfeet warrior making shocking admissions, the layers of horror begin to unfold.
In the older timeline, Good Stab recounts how a traumatic encounter with a mysterious creature called the “Cat Man” changed his fate forever. After a massacre and bizarre event, he awakens with vampiric abilities-regeneration, thirst for blood and becomes a nocturnal agent of vengeance against the white buffalo hunters who devastated his people’s land and the great herds. As he grows in supernatural power, his internal conflict intensifies: feeding on white hunters causes him to become like them; feeding on his own people forces moral and cultural betrayal.
The dual narratives collide as Arthur’s journal reveals his complicity, and Good Stab’s story becomes both myth and reality-a brutal, bloody chronicle of frontier violence, colonial betrayal, and monstrous transformation. Jones uses the vampire motif as more than monster-horror: he weaves Indigenous history, cultural survival, revenge, and identity into a chilling western-horror hybrid. By the end, we’re left with a haunting question: when the hunted become the hunter, what becomes of the self?
8. The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, Sarah Moses (translator)
| Author | Details |
| Title of the Book | The Unworthy |
| Author | Agustina Bazterrica |
| Genre | Horror, Fiction & Science Fiction |
| Published | March 4, 2025 by Scribner |
| Print Length | 192 pages, Paperback |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Unworthy-Novel-Agustina-Bazterrica/dp/1668051885 |
In a world ravaged by ecological collapse and societal breakdown, a cloistered convent called the Sacred Sisterhood becomes the refuge for a group of women. The narrator, unnamed, belongs to the lowest caste within this order: the “unworthy”. She journies her existence in secret, writing with whatever she can find-discarded ink, dirt, even her own blood.
Inside the convent’s austere walls, life is marked by rigorous hierarchies: the Enlightened at the top, the Chosen in the middle, and the unworthy at the bottom. Rituals of self-mutilation, punishment, and blind devotion are rife. The outside world remains barely glimpsed, but threats lurk: toxic haze, food scarcity, collapsed cities.
Everything shifts when a new woman, Lucía, arrives as an unworthy. Her presence unsettles the narrator’s memories and the convent’s established rituals. The narrator begins to question what she’s always accepted: her past, the meaning of faith, the cost of survival. In the tension between obedience and self-awareness, the book probes what it means to be worthy, and whether the system itself is the real cruelty.
9. Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Listen to Your Sister |
| Author | Neena Viel |
| Genre | Horror, Thriller, & Fiction |
| Published | February 4, 2025 by St. Martin’s Griffin |
| Print Length | 352 pages, Paperback |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Listen-Your-Sister-Neena-Viel/dp/1250906326 |
Twenty-five-year-old Calla Williams has taken on the role of guardian for her sixteen-year-old brother Jamie after their parents’ absence leaves a void in the family. Their middle sibling, Dre, promised to help but largely remains distant, leaving Calla bearing the emotional and practical burdens of looking after Jamie and keeping the household together. On top of that, Calla is haunted by recurring nightmares in which she watches her brothers dying-horrors she feels powerless to stop.
When Jamie’s reckless behaviour escalates particularly following his involvement in a protest that spirals beyond his control-the siblings are forced off the grid. They flee to a remote cabin that looks like it came from a slasher flick rather than a safe hide-out. But instead of respite, the cabin becomes the threshold of a far more malevolent threat. Calla’s nightmares begin encroaching on reality, doppelgangers and hauntings converge, and the siblings must face something that might be far worse than the trouble that drove them there.
The story evolves from an emotionally charged family drama into a surreal, nightmarish horror thriller. While the first half grounds itself in sibling dynamics, trauma and responsibility, the second half plunges into the weird reality warps, identity fractures, and the question becomes not just how to protect each other, but how to survive when the line between protector and monster blurs. Viel weaves themes of race, familial obligation and the ghosts of childhood into a haunting speculative horror framework.
10. Something in the Walls by Daisy Pearce
| Aspect | Details |
| Title of the Book | Something in the Walls |
| Author | Daisy Pearce |
| Genre | Horror, Thriller, Fiction & Mystery |
| Published | February 25, 2025 by Minotaur Books |
| Print Length | 295 pages, Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| Available at | https://www.amazon.in/Something-Walls-Daisy-Pearce/dp/1250334381 |
In summer 1989, Britain is gripped by a suffocating heat wave, and newly-qualified child psychologist Mina Ellis is restless. Still mourning her brother’s death six years earlier, and feeling out of place in her relationship with her precise, scientific fiancé Oscar, she seeks something more meaningful. At a bereavement support group Mina meets journalist Sam Hunter, who offers her a chance at relevance: join him in investigating the strange case of thirteen-year-old Alice Webber, who claims she is haunted by a witch living in the chimney of her family’s home in the isolated village of Banathel.
Mina and Sam travel to Banathel, where Alice’s behaviour becomes increasingly alarming: fits, visions, strange voices, black hair clots, pin-prick rashes and an old rural community steeped in superstition gathers around her. The Webber family is poor and isolated, and the villagers, convinced that dark traditions still live beneath the surface, circle in with candles, petitions and ritual-like gatherings. Mina’s professional certainty begins to crack as she realises that the danger might be both psychological and supernatural and that her own unresolved guilt and grief may make her vulnerable.
As Banathel reveals its darker underbelly, the book shifts from investigation into something more evocative and haunting. Mina must confront not just what is happening to Alice, but how much the past-the secrets of the village, the traditions of fear, the choices made in grief is shaping the present. The boundaries between mental illness, trauma and witchcraft blur, and Mina’s quest becomes not only about saving Alice, but saving herself from silence. Pearce uses the flickering heat, the oppressive village, the sense of being watched from behind walls and chimneys, to raise chilling questions about what hides unseen in the places we think are safe.
